microsoft

I have been a huge fan of Microsoft Visual Code Studio since it was introduced to me about a year ago and has been my default editor of choice (outside of vi for quick edits and even Code has a vi extension which I had used for awhile but it had some quirks). Last week I had shared on Twitter a screenshot of all the extensions I personally use, since this was something I get asked about from time to time.

I received a lot of positive feedback and I even learned about a few new extensions from a few folks. I figure I would provide the list of plugins I use as text which can then easily be searched directly in Code or via the Visual Studio Marketplace. Code itself supports a number of command-line options, including extension management and so I used the following command to generate the list of extensions I am currently using:

There were a several announcements at last weeks VMworld US Conference, but one of the most exciting piece of news in my opinion was from Alan Renouf, Product Manager for all things API/SDK/CLI at VMware. During Alan's What's New PowerCLI session, he announced that PowerCLI is finally coming to both Mac OS X as well as Linux! As you can imagine, the news was very well received from customers and partners. In fact, after I had tweeted the update here & here, I literally had folks pinging/IM'ing/DM'ing me non-stop about when they could get access 🙂

UPDATE (10/18/16) - PowerCLI Multi-Platform (MP) for Linux and Mac OS X has now been released as a VMware Fling. Please find the download here and provide any feedback in the comments section.

This exciting update was only possible with the help of our friends over at Microsoft who had recently open sourced both .NET Core & PowerShell. Once that news broke, Alan and the PowerCLI Engineering team have been working hard on porting over the existing PowerCLI code which uses the Windows .NET library over to the new .NET Core which is now open sourced. I have been very impressed at how fast the PowerCLI team have already made available many of the default cmdlets as well as the Get View cmdlet which exposes the entire functionality of the vSphere API.

Now, before you get too excited, this new version of PowerCLI is currently not available yet. As Alan mentioned in his session, we plan to release an early Tech Preview of PowerCLI for both Mac OS X and Linux as a VMware Fling shortly after VMworld. It is also very important to note that Microsoft PowerShell for Mac OS X & Linux which PowerCLI uses is just at an Alpha release milestone. There is still much work to do on both sides but I am really looking forward to enabling our customers with the choice of platform when it comes to consuming PowerCLI.

A few of us have been quite fortunate to have been involved in the early development of this new version of PowerCLI. In fact, we even built a simple Docker Container for PowerCLI which will allow you to easily access PowerCLI from any system that can run Docker. Here is a quick screenshot of spinning up a PowerCLI Docker Container which will also be part of the Fling release.

Lastly, we want customers to be able to quickly and securely set up a persistent PowerCLI environment in which they can use to manage and configure their VMware-based products that support PowerCLI. With that, we have also built a PowerShell package for Photon OS which is VMware's minimal Linux container host distribution. Not only is it free to download and use, but it literally takes a few seconds to install (tdnf -y install powershell) and even less time to boot up and import the PowerCLI module. This was literally done the week before VMworld by the Photon team and huge kudos for their support! As you can see, not only do we want to provide choice for our customers but also simplifying how you might consume PowerCLI whether its natively on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Docker Container or running on top of VMware Photon OS. I hope you are excited as I am and stay tuned for more details on the Fling release!

If you have any feedback or what you are most excited regarding this news, please leave a comment and I will make sure it makes it way back to our Product Manager.

I am constantly amazed at the number of guest operating systems that is supported on VMware products like VMware vSphere our Enterprise Hypervisor, vCloud Air our public cloud offering which runs on vSphere and our desktop products such as VMware Fusion and Workstation. If we just look at vSphere alone, it currently "lists" 101 supported guest operating systems! (full list below) However, this is actually a tiny subset of what is actually supported on vSphere as new guest OSes are constantly being added to the support matrix. This also does not include any pre-released operating systems like the recent Apple OS X Yosemite (10.10) Tech Preview. Heck, you can even run Windows 3.11 if you really want to as shown by my fellow VMware colleague Chris Colotti.

Getting back to the topic of this post, I know Microsoft has recently released a new Tech Preview of their upcoming Windows platform dubbed Windows 10 (not a typo, they decided to skip Windows 9) and I know some of you may be interested in trying out their latest release. What better way than to run it on VMware? I know there was a blog or two about running Windows 10 on vSphere, however there was some incorrect information about not being able to install VMware Tools or getting the optimized VMXNET3 driver working. I decided to run all three flavors (Windows 10 Desktop, Server and Hyper-V) on the latest vSphere 5.5 release (should work on previous releases of 5.5) and will share the Virtual Machine configuration.

Note: You can also run Windows 10 Tech Preview on both VMware Fusion and Workstation, take a look at this article for more details. These are great options in addition to vSphere and vCloud Air.

Windows 10 Desktop:

GuestOS: Windows 8 64-bit

Virtual HW: vHW10

Network Driver: VMXNET3

Storage Controller: LSI Logic SAS

Windows 10 Server:

GuestOS: Windows 2012 64-bit

Virtual HW: vHW10

Network Driver: VMXNET3

Storage Controller: LSI Logic SAS

Windows 10 Hyper-v:

GuestOS: Windows 2012 64-bit

Virtual HW: vHW10

Network Driver: VMXNET3

Storage Controller: LSI Logic SAS

CPU Advanced Setting: Enable VHV

VM Advanced Setting: hypervisor.cpuid.v0

For more details about running Hyper-V and the last two advanced settings, please take a look at this article on running other Hypervisors.

If you look closely at this last screenshot, you will see that I am not only running Windows 10 Hyper-V within a VM on ESXi, but I am also running a Nested Windows 10 VM within this Hyper-V VM! How cool is that!? Not sure there are good use cases for this, but if you wanted to, you could! In my opinion (although I may be bias because I work for VMware, but results speak for itself), VMware truly provides the best platform to the widest variety of x86 guest operating systems that exists.

Here are the guest operating systems that are currently "listed" in vSphere today that can be selected:

Many of you know that I am a huge fan of the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance), especially when it comes to a new deployment and how easy it is compared to the Windows version. I especially like how upgrades work for the VCSA by deploying a new VCSA and then performing a migration based upgrade to the new appliance. This provides a nice roll-back mechanism in case something happens and all I need to do is just power on the original VCSA to get the original environment up and running again.

Having said all this, I know the VCSA is still currently lacking a few features which may prevent customers from fully adopting the solution for their production workload. However, if you take a look a how far the VCSA has come from its initial release in vSphere 5.0 release, it has greatly improved and we continue to enhance it with every release. With release of vSphere 5.5, we now support the following configurations maximums:

ESXi Hosts

Virtual Machines

Embedded vPostgres DB

100

3,000

External Oracle DB

1000

10,000

Even before vSphere 5.5 release, VMware has internally pushed the boundaries of the VCSA (vSphere 5.1) and the embedded vPostgres database by running one of the most dynamic and demanding workload in a very short amount of time which is the VMworld's Hands On Lab. This really goes to show the type of scale and performance the VCSA and the embedded vPostgres database can support.

One of the most frequent piece of feedback that I have heard from customers regarding the VCSA is to provide support for Microsoft SQL Server database. This request is quite understandable, especially for a Windows shop where you may already have a team of Database Administrators who are quite familiar with the operational and management aspects of maintaining a MSSQL database.

VMware is actually not opposed to supporting MSSQL for the VCSA which runs on SuSE Linux but the challenge in the past was the lack of a Microsoft ODBC driver for SLES. Well it turns out last year Mircosoft released a Community Tech Preview Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on SLES, however the driver is currently only a Tech Preview and to do justice for VMware customers, we would want to use a GA (General Available) driver which means that there would be full support from Microsoft.

If you would like the VCSA to have MSSQL support, you can help by providing this feedback to your local Microsoft representative or filing a feature request. The more customer demand we have for this, the more likelihood MSSQL DB support can become a reality.

In addition to providing feedback to Microsoft, I think it would also be useful to let our PMs know how important MSSQL DB support & the VCSA is to you which will also help with the prioritization of features. If you can help fill out this quick survey below, that would also be great.

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William Lam is a Staff Solutions Architect working in the VMware Cloud on AWS team within the Cloud Platform Business Unit (CPBU) at VMware. He focuses on Automation, Integration and Operation of the VMware Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC).